Tools, Testing, & Virtual Systems

Interview with Girish Venkatasubramanian

By Jakob Engblom

After my blog post on Academic Simics earlier this Summer, I got a very nice reply from Girish Venkatasubramanian of UFL. Turned out that he and his group was doing some really interesting and exciting stuff with Simics, researching into Hypervisor architectures and hardware support. Having been a PhD student myself, I can certainly appreciate the excitement and fun of working in that field. We ended up doing a virtual interview, which I am happy to present here.

Workbench and Jazz

By Emeka Nwafor

Today I managed to carve out some quality hands-on time to play with Wind River Workbench integrated with Rational Team Concert - also known as Jazz. While playing with this development environment, I found myself wishing that "I had these types of development tools back when I was doing embedded development environment".

If you are not familiar with Rational Team Concert (RTC), think of it as a collaborative development platform that unifies planning, tracking, automation of software development processes, team collaboration, work item management, and reporting (think dashboards) with traceability across all artifacts that participate in software delivery processes. By artifacts, I mean things like source code, builds, defects, requirements, log files, change sets, etc... In short, RTC is all about connecting team members.

When integrated with Workbench the integrated development environment provides developers with the ability to connect-with and optimize an embedded devicewhile connecting team members that are participating in the software delivery activities. I strongly believe that to be successful, organizations need to effectively manage both device technology and people collaboration concerns.

There is much that can be said about the environment and the integration opportunities. More of this will come out over time. For now, there are 3 simple things that have got me jazzed up about Workbench and RTC:

1. Clean Integration with Eclipse...

Folks close to me will acknowledge that over the last 8 years, I have had a sinusoidal love-struggle-love-struggle-love-struggle feeling about Eclipse. Hopefully, that is behind me now. Building Workbench on the Eclipse platform is the only way we could have enabled this type of integration for embedded device development. The benefit to a Workbench / RTC user is a cleanly integrated usage experience and traceability of artifacts - like Workbench's Memory Analysis log files - with Rational Team Concert's work-item automation engine. A need that I hear from customers is about how they can improve the collaboration between the platform integration teams and the distributed teams developing the device's application logic. The RTC collaboration infrastructure can help here by sharing much of the system build, test case, and environmental information that must be conveyed the developers to help shorten the "time-to-fix" when defects are found.

Another impressive discovery was that RTC is not just for Java. Many of change management related process templates simply just work with the Eclipse CDT. That was a really nice discovery...

2. It is a Very Pleasant Development Environment...

The Jazz platform brings in a number of widgets that simply make it a delightful environment for software development. Things like snapshots, thumbnail views of images, RSS, and chat all add a little sparkle to the Workbench IDE.

3. RTC/Jazz Doesn't Get in the Way!

As we were thinking about the integration of Workbench with RTC, I have to admit that I was a little nervous about the process automation and reporting aspects of the solution. Not the case. The process automation framework is highly customizable; you can enable as much or as little as you want and get value out of the solution without it getting in the way.RTC puts a lot of emphasis on agile workflows. I really like having out-of-box samples and templates to enact the processes of an agile team, but in using it I discovered that teams that are simply doing milestone or time-boxed based planning would benefit from the solution.

I will be demoing the integration of Workbench and RTC for VxWorks 6.8 at the IBM Innovate Conference in Orlando, Florida. The demo will preview some integration work done by Doug Schaefer and enabled by the IBM Ready for Rational Software team - the group responsible for validating that commercial offerings meet IBM's integration criteria and will be well behaved when inserted in our customer's environments. A special "thank you" to IBM Rational software's Pat McCarthy for his patience in running me through RTC bootcamp.

My goal is to use the demo to provoke some conversation on other integration points. If you can't make the demo and are interested in trying out this integration on your own, drop me comment and I'll post the set-up instructions.

Stark Bloggin' Mad!

By Emeka Nwafor

Wow!!! OK, so how is it that a few innocent tweets about the iPad gets me embroiled in a little Twitter / blogosphere skirmish with a colleague? Who would have thunk it? It's not just Schaefer, almost everyone seems to have formulated an opinion or a prediction about the future of mobile computing. Following last week's announcement of the Apple iPad there has been an impressive flood of blogs, microblogs, and YouTube from pundits and pranksters, alike.  I don't recall a technology preview that had as much publicly generated hype and excitement as the iPad announcement.

So how is it that the company that is focused on bringing us the best possible personal computing experience has generated so much emotion and excitement? iSchmad? Please...

I think that much of the excitement has to deal with the fact that many of us are not fully satisfied with the current state of mobile computing experience and we were looking to Apple - or anyone else - to show us a better way. I have to admit that when I first saw the iPad launch on Wednesday, I wasn't blown away. A few days later, I'm still not sure I completely get it, but I think it is a Good Thing for the industry for a couple of reasons:

1. The tablet form factor is well suited for rendering digital media. There have been several attempts over the years to tabletize the PC. The iPad is taking a different approach that just might work. Chip vendors, hardware vendors, software stacks - commercial and open source - will all optimize their offerings to follow Apple's lead and participate in the new market created by the iPad. I see this as a Good Thing. Within the next 18 months, we can expect both product choice and downward cost pressures which will make the technology broadly accessible and help bridge the digital divide.
2. Digital living is here. Wind River participates in the market of device vendors that are trying to connect all the devices in our homes - allowing you to get access to internet content anywhere. In his blog, Schaefer makes allusions to yours truly being an "Apple Fanboy". Yes, I have some of their gear and I like it very much because it works well and delivers on a great usage experience for listening to music, watching videos, sharing pictures, and surfing the web. And, oh yeah... the Apple stuff looks great, too. If the iPad is successful - and I predict it will be - then we will all benefit from the new standard for content sharing and device connectivity that will be set by Apple's innovation and the momentum it has built from the iPhone and iTunes.

Fascinating.